Competitiveness

When you talk about competitiveness you most likely think about your favorite sporting team or sports person. How are they performing at present, have they won their recent matches, where are they ranked and how fit are they? Each week they go out and compete against another team or another player. Their life is all about competition and trying to improve their ability to win their next match and each one thereafter. They think solely in terms of their fitness to compete and seek to identify and improve all the elements that impact that fitness.

Each and every match they compete in, will require that they adopt varying tactics or strategies to overcome their opponent. They know that they cannot rely upon the same old tactics time and time again.

When you reflect on your business and how well it is performing, do you ever consider its ability to compete? Do you ever view your business as competing in its market against other companies? Do you ever view your business as being in a competition where each and every day it must seek to improve its offering and performance?

Effective competition requires the creation of an organization that thinks in terms of its ability to compete and continuously strengthens that ability. It requires Business Leaders that focus on making their organizations Competitively Fit and Tactically Alive.

Competitively Fit businesses are able to:

1. Lead their markets, customers and competitors forward,
   

2. Continuously adapt to changing conditions, and
   

3. Always deliver improving value to its customers.

Strategy and Structure

Which comes first , strategy or structure? For almost as long as strategic management theory has been taught in Business Schools (40+ years), there has been a pre-eminent approach to strategy which is first you set your strategy to achieve your goals and then you set your organizational structure to support that strategy. Organizational structure was seen as a function of strategy.

This one-way view of the relationship between strategy and structure has led to a simplistic approach whereby strategies can be devised in isolation and then an organization (structure) set behind it to deliver that strategy. However, the complexity of the relationship between strategy and organizational structure renders this approach ineffectual in many business contexts.

By contrast, it is interesting to note that a study of the various classical Chinese military strategy works (3000+ years old) reveals an approach to strategy that states, firstly, look to your organizational structure and then develop strategies that the organization is capable of delivering so as to achieve its goals. This is an approach to strategy that is premised upon continuously building an organization that is Competitively Fit to win more and more competitions.

In essence strategy, strategic thinking and strategic management theory has only one purpose and that is to enable an enterprise to compete effectively so as to achieve its goals. Strategy is all about competitiveness and competing.

Competitive Engine

The Competitive Engine is a model of those elements that work in unison to determine the competitiveness of your organization. If one or more of those elements are out of sync or not properly tuned then the engine of your business will be running inefficiently and its

competitiveness will be adversely impacted.

As a Business Leader you must constantly monitor, realign and fuel your engine to drive the competitiveness and enduring success of your business.

Building A Competitive Business

Building a Competitive Business examines the traits of highly successful businesses and what enables them to continuously step out from their competitors. It describes the engine that drives competitiveness of every business. Building an exceptional business requires a well-tuned and high performance engine to drive success.   More....

Want to learn more about the Competitive Engine and how you may utilize it to drive the success of your business? Then I invite you to download the model from this link.